On the Curious Nature of Ideas or Where the Heck do You Come Up With this Stuff?

Today I’m going to offer you a rare bit of insight into my head.

I know, I know – scary stuff indeed.  And it is, believe me.  My head is a rather bizarre and off-beat place much of the time.  But still – shedding light on bizarre and off-beat can be kind of interesting sometimes, so I’m going to risk it.  Granted, you may think I’m even weirder after reading, but who knows, maybe just maybe it will make me even more interesting.  I choose to translate weird as interesting most of the time – at least when it’s an adjective applied to me personally – maybe you will too…

So I shall insight away.

I have posted a number of short stories/flash fiction pieces on here, as well as some poems – all of which are “original” works.  It occurs to me that some people may wonder where I get the ideas for said works.  Are they inspired by real life?  Do they reflect my feelings/attitudes/hopes/fears on the day or at the time they were written?  Do they come to me in dreams?  Are they symbolic representations of the inner workings of my psyche?

Sometimes, not always, yes, um sure.  In that order.

Some of the things I write about are inspired by real life – by things I’ve seen or heard or done.  An excellent example – “The Boys”.  This is almost exactly what happened when my best friend’s boys were visiting Auntie Jill one day – names were changed to protect the innocent, and some of the details were embellished, but the basic gist (including the fabulous words of Timothy) were very definitely real.  But most of the time, I put a twist on the real things rather than turn them into a straight-up retelling.  Case in point – a real cemetery walk/photo opportunity with The Fiancee inspired “That’s All There Is To It”.  But I’d like to think I was not nearly as annoying as Olivia.  And that The Fiancee didn’t envision quite the ending that Henry brought about…  (teehee)

I often write things with strong feelings/emotional content and a lot of dark/spooky/eerie goings on – that is because I find such things interesting to read.  Most of the time these are not related to how I feel at the particular moment that I am writing them.  Sometimes they are redolent of previous feelings/experiences, sometimes they are based on things I’ve seen or read elsewhere that made an emotional impact.  And sometimes they are pure, straight-up extrapolations or imaginings.

A good case in point here is a poem I wrote recently for a blog contest (hasn’t been published or posted yet, but likely will once the contest runs its course) about the feeling of being trapped in your life.  I do not feel trapped in my life – I quite enjoy every aspect of it these days.  But I have felt that way at times before, and I drew upon those feelings to write the poem because I wanted something that was in a strong emotional contrast to my other entry (which the blogger did select – visit here for info on that one) – a poem about love (which was based on current emotional state at the time of writing).

And yes, many of my ideas do actually, literally come to me in dreams.  This is a weird experience but one that happens to me a lot – it’s actually how I came to start writing.  I have, for a long time now, been a poor sleeper.  I have bouts of insomnia, wake up a lot, sleep restlessly, and wake up tired often.  Have for years.  Well, a couple of years ago, right around the time that things were getting really bad at The Former Job (details on that and how I came to be a writer are fleshed out in my bio here), I started having dreams with even more specific messages/plots than usual.

I’ve always had whacked-out, crazy-ass dreams.  They have emotions, violence, physicality, sensory perception – and I often wake up exhausted and/or emotionally drained (or charged, depending on the dream) and absolutely certain throughout the day that I had conversations with people that I only had in the dream.  Well, these particular new dreams felt like storylines, so I decided to start writing them down.  Six months or so later I had a notebook full of story ideas scribbled on little snippets of paper, and that eventually turned into the inspiration I needed to try my hand at writing full time (once a series of other, economic/professional events occurred – again, see the bio for details, don’t want to bore you with repetitiveness more than I must).

Most of my longer works of fiction are ideas that generated in dreams.  I have had character names appear to me, plots, titles, dialogue – it’s wild, really.

Sometimes the ideas come from other people too – from things I see in the world or funny/weird things that I overhear or experience, or straight from other people’s mouths as story ideas.  The Fiancee is an excellent source of ideas for short fiction – particularly eerie, creepy things, so if you enjoy those, thank him!  I keep telling him he should write them down himself, but secretly I hope he never takes me up on that because I like his ideas and would miss them as source-material!  (teehee)

As for my psyche, well, I don’t know how to answer that one.  You’ve now seen a glimpse into my head/my process – I’ll let you be the judge! 🙂